Sermon: Ordinary Families

This week we continued with our series Ordinary ≠ Insignificant. Brandon Clements taught how ordinary families are a major part of God’s extraordinary purposes from Deuteronomy 6:5-9. Here is a quick recap of this week’s gathering:

In a culture that seems to state that our job as parents is to provide a couple decades of happiness, we want to look at what the gospel says our job is as parents. We want to reclaim our families for Christ and train our children to be God loving disciples. Here are four practical ways we can do that:

1. Realize the small things are big things.

We know it seems like Tuesdays don’t really matter but who your kid becomes will be about 1/7th due to the reality of what you guys do on ordinary days like Tuesdays. As God speaks to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:5-9, our faith in Him ought to spill out of us as we live ordinary life with our families. The gospel should become a part of our everyday lives for our kids to see. As they learn how to be healthy adults through you, they also learn what it means to be a Christian.

2. Train your kids to live life under God.

In Ephesians 6:4, tells us discipline plays an important role in raising kids. There are two types of discipline: 1) formative discipline and 2) corrective discipline. Formative discipline is instruction. It’s intentional training on how to live life under God as a healthy human being. Corrective discipline is what happens when kids rebel against the formative discipline or instruction that you’ve already set. Corrective discipline happens best when we’ve already set the formative discipline--so we’re not unhelpfully disciplining our kids when we haven’t taught them yet.

3. Give them grace.

Our ultimate goal as Christian parents isn’t to have well-behaved children, but children who love Jesus and become disciples who go on to make other disciples. This means that in training them we aren’t just correcting their behavior, we also speak gospel truth to their hearts through our words and our actions. This means that while we are firm, direct and intentional about shaping them into healthy adults, we aren’t overly harsh with them. It also means that my discipline should have the end goal of restoring relationship through grace.

4. Give yourself grace, too.

Parenting is an incredibly daunting task. The weight of the responsibility that comes with raising little humans can be crushing. For any parents overwhelmed by the weight of parenting, I have good news for you--the gospel is not just good news for your salvation--it’s also good news for your parenting. Because of Jesus’s righteousness given to you, there’s no pressure to be a perfect parent. You are free to love your kids and serve them out of the grace Jesus has given you without feeling an ounce of pressure to be perfect.